The Picatrix: How an Arabic Grimoire Taught Europe to Trap Planets in Talismans

In 1256 a translator working for Alfonso X of Castile finished a book and dated it four ways: 1256 of the Lord, 1295 of Caesar, 1568 of Alexander, and 655 of the Arabs. The book arrived with a story. Its prologue said that a “most wise philosopher” called Picatrix had compiled it from more than two hundred books of philosophy and had named it after himself.

Nobody can say with certainty who that philosopher was. The name itself refuses to sit still. What the book does, though, is documented in plain detail. The Picatrix, as Latin Europe called it, is a four-book manual of astral magic: instructions for trapping the influence of the planets in engraved stones and metal rings, and for choosing the hour when the Moon sits in the right sign.

Its Arabic original has a calmer name. Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm means “The Goal of the Wise” or “The Aim of the Sage.” Written in Islamic Spain, it crossed into Latin Europe through the court of Alfonso X, and from there it reached the Renaissance thinkers who decided what magic meant in the West. David Pingree, who edited the Latin text, called it the most thorough exposition of celestial magic in Arabic.

What Is the Picatrix, and Where Does Its Astral Magic History Begin?

The Arabic text describes itself. Its author says he began it after finishing a shorter work, the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm, the Rank of the Sage, in 343 AH, and completed the longer book in 348 AH. Those dates come to roughly 954 and 959 of the common era. The book runs to about four hundred pages and is divided into four parts.

Astral magic rests on the oldest claim of astrology taken to its mechanical end: that the sky shapes what happens below, and that a skilled operator can build a device that draws that influence down. The Picatrix’s devices are talismans. A talisman is a figure engraved into a stone or a metal that belongs to a planet, made at the hour and in the sign when that planet is strongest, then consecrated with smoke and prayer, and on occasion with blood.

The machinery is thorough. The book organizes much of its material around the twenty-eight lunar mansions, the stations the Moon passes through each month, and assigns each one its proper images. It draws on the whole library available to an Andalusian scholar: the alchemical corpus of Jabir ibn Hayyan, the encyclopedias of the Brethren of Purity, Ibn Wahshiyya’s Nabataean Agriculture, Sabian planetary worship, and Hermetic treatises attributed to Aristotle.

For a grimoire, it carries an unusual amount of theory. Whole chapters argue why the correspondence between above and below works. The Latin text defines its subject in one line: “we call magic everything hidden from the senses.”

Who Wrote the Ghayat al-Hakim? Two Maslamas and a Ghost

The authorship question is where the Picatrix stops behaving like a book and starts behaving like a detective case.

For centuries the work was credited to Maslama al-Majriti, the famous astronomer and mathematician of Cordoba. Ibn Khaldun, the great North African historian, put the name in the Muqaddimah, and that attribution stuck for hundreds of years.

There is a problem with it. The book’s own preface dates its composition to the 950s. Maslama al-Majriti died around 1005 to 1008, and by most reckonings he was a young child when the work claims to have been finished. He cannot have written it, at least not in the years the text names.

Modern scholars kept the name for convenience and called the author “Pseudo-Maslama.” Then in 1996 the historian Maribel Fierro made a case for a different Cordoban: Maslama ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi, who died in 964. His biographer Ibn al-Faradi recorded that he had “a doctrine of his own, as well as a secret and a book,” and described him as a practitioner of charms and talismans.

Godefroid de Callatay and Sebastien Moureau, who have spent the last decade on the paper trail, now present Maslama ibn Qasim as the genuine author of the Rutbat al-Hakim and of the Ghayat al-Hakim. The confusion, they argue, was almost inevitable. The two Maslamas shared the same given name and the same city-name, and both were known as Andalusians. A medieval librarian had to look twice, and most did not.

How Did the Book Cross from Arabic into Latin?

The crossing happened in the workshop of Alfonso X of Castile, the king who tried to gather the learning of his age under one roof. Alfonso, whose reign ran from 1252 to 1284, commissioned teams of translators to render Arabic science and philosophy into the languages of his court. Much of that work happened in Toledo, where the schools of translators had been turning Arabic learning into Latin for a century. The Picatrix was part of that program.

The Latin prologue says it plainly. Alfonso, “king of Spain and all of Andalusia,” ordered the book, “whose name is Picatrix,” translated from Arabic into Spanish “with the greatest study and diligence,” and the work was completed in 1256.

What happened next matters for everything the book became. The Latin version was not made from the Arabic directly. It was made from the Castilian translation, which had already altered the Arabic, cutting whole sections, perhaps because a Christian court found them too difficult or too offensive. The Latin text that circulated in Europe is shorter than the Arabic original, a rendering of a rendering.

Europe did not seem to mind. The book was never printed in the early modern period, but it moved through manuscript, and it moved widely. More than twenty Latin copies survive. They were read, annotated, and passed on.

The colophon dates the finished work in four calendars at once: 1256 of the Lord, 1295 of the era of Caesar, 1568 of Alexander, and 655 of the Arabs. Four ways of counting one year, and the book that carried them was itself a meeting of worlds.

Why “Picatrix”? A Name That Won’t Stay Put

The Latin prologue says the book was named for its author. “Here begins the book,” runs the translation by Dan Attrell and David Porreca, “that this most wise philosopher Picatrix composed about the magical arts.” The man was a “Picatrix,” and so was the book.

Where that name came from is a small unresolved case of its own.

The old explanation was that “Picatrix” was a mangled form of the Arabic “Buqratis,” which is Hippocrates. The theory has fallen out of favor for a solid reason: the same text cites Hippocrates separately under the Latin name Ypocras, which is a strange way to treat the same person twice. David Pingree, the editor of the Latin text, put the point bluntly. He was not convinced, he wrote, “by any of the attempts to identify Buqratis = Picatrix with a Greek author, whether Hippocrates or Harpocration.”

A newer suggestion comes from the philologist Johannes Thomann. In 1990 he proposed that “Picatrix” was coined as a feminine form of picator (“one who stings”), playing on the Arabic root of Maslama (ladagha, to sting). On that reading the name is a deliberate translator’s pun on the author’s name.

Both explanations have defenders. Neither has won. What the reader of the Latin text saw was a single confident claim in the book’s own opening line: that a philosopher named Picatrix had composed it. That claim is the closest thing the book gives to an answer.

What Did the Talismans Actually Say?

The heart of the Picatrix is practical. It tells you how to make the thing.

The method follows a fixed logic. Each planet owns a metal and a stone. Saturn holds lead, Jupiter tin and chalcedony, Mars iron, the Sun gold and diamond, Venus copper. Each day of the week belongs to a planet, and each planet has an hour of its own. The operator chooses the right day, the right hour, and the right phase of the Moon, engraves a figure into the material, and consecrates the finished object with suffumigation, the smoke of a prepared incense, so that the planetary spirit is drawn down into the talisman.

A manuscript of the Latin text preserves the “rings of the planets,” short recipes that show the method at its most compressed. The ring of Saturn is carved into a stone called torquesia on a Saturday, with the Moon in Capricorn: a man standing on a dragon, holding a sickle, set in lead. The ring of the Sun shows the Sun riding a chariot drawn by four horses, cut into diamond on a Sunday, and the text promises that “whatever you say will be listened to reverently.” The ring of Jupiter is a man seated on an eagle, carved in chalcedony and set in tin. The ring of Mars, showing a man in armor holding swords and a severed head, is cut in iron on a Tuesday and promises victory in battle. The ring of Venus, a standing woman holding a comb, is made in copper and wins the favor of women and kings.

The recipes come with warnings. The wearer of the Sun’s ring must not eat a white dove or lie with a white woman while he carries it. The wearer of Saturn’s ring should keep out of dark places. These are the working notes of a craft manual, written in complete seriousness, and they are what the book’s medieval readers copied and recopied.

Whether any of this worked is not a question the book engages. It is a manual, not an argument. It assumes the correspondence between the planets and their materials, and then it tells you, with great patience, what to do.

How Did the Picatrix Reach Ficino and Agrippa?

By the fifteenth century the Latin Picatrix was a standard item in the libraries of learned magic, and the Renaissance magicians read it closely.

Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine scholar who revived Plato and the Hermetic texts for Christian Europe, wrote the De vita, completed in 1489. In its third part he takes up the question of drawing beneficial influence from the heavens, and the machinery he describes, talismans made at the right planetary hour, stands in the direct line of the Picatrix. The historian Ioan Culianu put the debt plainly: “much of Ficino’s astrological magic derives from the Picatrix.” Scholars still argue about how directly Ficino used the book, but the family resemblance is not in dispute. He sits in the same Hermetic current as the figure profiled in our article on Hermes Trismegistus.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa went further. His Three Books of Occult Philosophy, printed from 1531 to 1533, assembled the whole tradition into one encyclopedia, planetary correspondences, talismans, seals, and all. The Picatrix is one of the main sources behind it. For two centuries afterward, a European magician who wanted the authoritative method reached for Agrippa, and through Agrippa they were reading the Picatrix. That same Solomonic and goetic line runs through the Ars Goetia and, in a different register, the Grand Grimoire.

The influence reached further than the professional magicians. Frances Yates, in her study of Giordano Bruno, and Eugenio Garin each treated the Picatrix as a key to the Renaissance imagination. Garin wrote that the book is as indispensable for understanding Renaissance culture as the Corpus Hermeticum. Avner Ben-Zaken has argued that the Picatrix’s practical, recipe-driven magic helped push European thinkers from occult speculation toward experiment.

The Arabic Original: Lost, Found, and Still Unfinished

For all its influence in Europe, the Arabic original of the Picatrix was a ghost.

European scholars knew the Latin and the fragmentary Castilian, but the Arabic text was thought lost, and for a long time no one could say where it was. Around 1920 the scholar Wilhelm Printz turned up an Arabic manuscript, and the text was finally published in 1933 by Hellmut Ritter as Das Ziel des Weisen, “The Goal of the Wise.” The Arabic had survived all along, in the libraries of the Islamic world.

The witnesses are few but real. An Arabic manuscript in Riyadh, King Saud University MS 5751, dates from the eighteenth century. A copy in Istanbul, Hamidiye Library MS 852, is undated. Another Istanbul manuscript, Hagia Sophia 2443, carries the date 1612. An Arabic copy that appeared at auction is older still, dated to 15 September 1255, a year before the Castilian translation was completed.

That dated copy is worth pausing on. The Arabic text was still being copied in Egypt and Syria at the exact moment the Latin West was translating it. Two traditions ran in parallel, one in Arabic for readers across the Islamic world, one in Latin for the scholars of Europe, each convinced it held the true form of the same book. The talisman tradition runs wider than either of these lines; the Pantacle of the Solomonic books is its own branch.

The Latin preface opens plainly: “Here begins the book that this most wise philosopher Picatrix composed about the magical arts.” The readers who followed him formed a broad network: physicians and clergymen, astrologers and antiquaries, a Florentine philosopher who wanted the heavens on his side, and an English astrologer who studied the Sloane manuscript. The colophon kept counting the year four ways, and the book kept being copied.

Who wrote it and what the name meant are still argued. The manuscripts settled one thing on their own. They kept the warning, and they kept the method, the rings and the suffumigations that went with them, for the reader the book itself called the wise.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Ghayat al-Hakim (Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, ‘The Goal of the Wise’), Arabic text, ed. Hellmut Ritter, Das Ziel des Weisen, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 12, Leipzig/Berlin 1933
• Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim, ed. David Pingree, Studies of the Warburg Institute 39, London 1986 (prologue, colophon, and the planetary rings in the appendix)
• Dan Attrell and David Porreca (trans.), Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic, Penn State University Press, 2019
• John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock (trans.), The Picatrix: Liber Atratus / The Complete Picatrix, Renaissance Astrology Editions, 2010/2011
• Ritter, Hellmut, and Martin Plessner (trans.), Picatrix: Das Ziel des Weisen, Studies of the Warburg Institute 27, London 1962
• Maribel Fierro, ‘Bāṭinism in Al-Andalus. Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Author of the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm and the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix)’, Studia Islamica 84 (1996)
• Godefroid de Callatay and Sebastien Moureau, ‘De nuevo sobre Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, los Ijwān al-Ṣafā’ e Ibn Jaldūn’, Al-Qantara 37 (2016), and ‘A Milestone in the History of Andalusī Bāṭinism’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017)
• Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah (traditional attribution of the Ghayat to Maslama al-Majriti)
• Martin Plessner, summary of the Picatrix, esotericarchives.com (chapter-by-chapter synopsis, the Couliano quotation, and the Sloane 3679 provenance)
• The Medieval Review 19.09.12, review of the Attrell/Porreca translation (translation chain, readership, and the name ‘Picatrix’)
• Library of Congress, ‘Fragment of the Picatrix’, item 2021667701